The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is usually relatively quiet. It’s not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole’s activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. Most of the time. Recently, astronomers caught

The team was gathered in a conference room last week, about 35 in all, ready to celebrate India’s triumph: the country’s first lunar landing. Like many watching the livestream broadcast from the control center in Bengaluru half a world away, John Thornton, the chief executive of Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company that is developing a moon

New FlexGround Service Delivers High-Speed Broadband to Forces in Remote Areas For more than five decades, Intelsat General has been providing the satellite capacity and the services needed by the U.S. and allied governments to support troops operating in the world’s hot spots. Satellite technology on the ground and in space has improved greatly in

After Asteroid 2006 QQ23 zipped by Earth last month and Asteroid 2010 CO1 flew past just a few hours ago, another asteroid is set to safely pass our planet this weekend. NASA has confirmed that the Asteroid 2000 QW7, will zip by Earth at 7:54pm EDT on September 14 (5:24am IST on September 15). The

Chile en Nogada, an iconic Mexican dish featuring poblano chile peppers bathed in creamy white sauce and topped with red pomegranate seeds, from the Azul Condesa restaurant in Mexico City More Speaking against a backdrop of two soaring, snow-capped volcanoes, Asuncion Diaz explains his fight to save the original poblano chile, one of the most

A damaged area of the Amazon rainforest left behind by an illegal mining operation near Puerto Maldonado, Peru More The Amazon’s Amahuaca people braved marauding rubber tappers a century ago, and now face a new threat to their survival as gold mines and oil wells increasingly encircle their jungle home. They and other indigenous communities

PARIS — Earth imaging startup Satellogic has signed an agreement with a Chinese company that will give it access to its fleet of satellites for imaging a Chinese province. The agreement with ABDAS, a Chinese data science company, gives that company exclusive access to Satellogic’s constellation of imaging satellites for imaging sites within China’s Henan

You might think you already know black – even super-black Vantablack, previously the blackest material known to science – but researchers just came up with a material that takes black to a new level of blackness. The new, as-yet-unnamed ultra-black material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscopic carbon strings that are a

Neuroscientists think they have found a key area in our brains that helps us assess and respond to what we find beautiful, also known as aesthetic appeal. And that appeal could be more linked to our sense of self than you might expect. When something pleases us visually – whether it’s a fine piece of

SpaceX just posted dramatic footage of its commercial space taxi Crew Dragon undergoing rigorous tests of its emergency abort system. The idea is that if something goes wrong with the rocket carrying the Crew Dragon to orbit, the module can engage its own thrusters to quickly escape the danger – and then coast down safely

The Space Force cannot be insular, aloof, or detached from clear and present security challenges and joint needs in the terrestrial domains. Our armed forces stand on the brink of historic change – the standup of a United States Space Force. The inception of a new armed service will be followed by an extensive discussion

A class of pesticides linked with declining insect numbers across the globe has similarly negative effects on wild songbird populations, new research suggests. As researchers from Canada’s University of Saskatchewan and York University report in the journal Science, white-crowned sparrows exposed to low doses of an insecticide called imidacloprid experienced significant weight loss, leading them

In flooded Redovan, some 50km (30 miles) southwest of Alicante, some people were being evacuated with diggers More Three more people died as torrential rain and flash floods battered southeastern Spain, raising the death toll to five with the rising waters causing havoc for travellers and forcing 3,500 people from their homes, officials said Friday.

Vibration imaging of buried object using LAMBDIS. Credit: V. Aranchuk, Univ. Mississippi More Detecting landmines can be a challenging and slow process. Detecting them from a moving vehicle would make the process more speedy, but at the expense of accuracy. At the Optical Society’s (OSA) Laser Congress, held 29 September—3 October 2019 in Vienna, Austria,

Credit: CC0 Public Domain More Domestic cats, like many other mammals, use smelly secretions from anal sacs to mark territory and communicate with other animals. A new study from the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis shows that many odiferous compounds from a male cat are actually made not by the cat, but

Ancient Australia was home to strange marsupial giants, some weighing over 1,000 kg. Credit: Hazel Richards (2019) Palorchestid marsupials, an extinct group of Australian megafauna, had strange bodies and lifestyles unlike any living species, according to a study released September 13, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Hazel Richards of Monash University, Australia

Gemini Observatory two-color composite image of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) which is the first interstellar comet ever identified. This image was obtained using the Gemini North Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) from Hawaii’s Maunakea. The image was obtained with four 60-second exposures in bands (filters) r and g. Blue and red dashes are images of background stars which